WEBVTT 1 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:18.000 I'm back. You know, something that's always puzzled me has been Bill Johnson endorsing Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland. That has always been a surprise to me. 2 00:00:18.000 --> 00:01:02.000 Speaker B: In 2012, a prophet friend of mine sent me a word that, uh, the Lord was going to open up a connection, a thread of connection to Kenneth Copeland. And I was to pull the thread and something would open up for us as a family. And I tell you what, I have just fallen in love with this man. I am so thankful that we have the opportunity to receive a real believer, a, um, believing believer, a man of genuine faith. In fact, that was the word I got in 2012, that there would be a specific release over this house. And I just feel like the luckiest guy on the planet to be able to say, here's my friend Kenneth Copeland to come to minister to us to tonight. I'd like for you to welcome him 3 00:01:02.000 --> 00:10:12.000 now. It shouldn't have been a surprise. And I think I now realize why I missed it, why I didn't expect them to do that. Because in my mind, these guys are prosperity preachers. You guys have heard of prosperity preachers, right? They are the ones who say, God always wants you to be healthy, wealthy, rich, just all of the blessings of life, you know, business and family and every other way God wants you to prosper. And that, that is always God's will for your life. And then it becomes all this cascading number of weird, unbiblical doctrines that have to support such a belief. Because now you have to explain why people aren't getting healed. Okay? So then they have to have classes on how to keep your healing, how to get your healing, treating faith as a power, and, uh, skipping over all kinds of truths in scripture so that you can reinforce this idea that a person is supposed to be prosperous at all times. And we're going to not talk about Paul saying, I know how to be abased and how to abound, or about how it is, in fact, harder for a, uh, camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven. Or how Jesus himself taught not to store up treasures on earth, but to store up treasures in heaven. But that's not what this video is about. This video is like, why did Bill endorse these guys? And consequently, why is it that the movement that Bill had become one of the most influential men in the world in the charismatic movement? Why is it that this movement was sort of incapable of calling out the obvious frauds and false teachers that are Benny Hinn and, And Kenneth Copeland and then their offshoots, who are often growing in popularity online, uh, even today. So I think I figured something out and it was this. And this is going to be something that sounds like a no brainer. And there's a lot of pieces of this I already understood. But here's the new thing. To me, I didn't quite comprehend fully how much prosperity preaching was embedded inside Bethel's teaching and inside, not all, but a decent amount of the charismatic movement through the guise of prophecy. So you might call this prosperity. Yeah, I worked on that. Prosperity, it's the prophecy culture, along with the prophetic movement, along with the, uh, prosperity preaching, creating sort of a prosperity movement. And let me explain what I, what I mean by that. And I'm going to do by reading a tweet I wrote, because I thought I wrote this fairly well and I can kind of comment on myself, as weird as that may sound. This is the revelation. And I really want the Charismatics to listen to this and consider it because I do this for your benefit. What's the purpose of this video? It's to help those who are zealous for prophecy. As, uh, scripture tells you to be zealous for prophecy. It's to help you to be more zealous in a biblical fashion for the prophecy that God wants. And, uh, let me walk you through. So I'll read what I wrote earlier. I just came to a realization I don't think I fully got before. It's about the combination of prosperity preaching with prophetic culture that has become a mainstay in the charismatic movement. Hang with me for a moment as I unpack it. I think this is important, and I really do think this is super important. So I hope that you guys will hang out, unpack this. Especially if you're charismatic. I want you to process this with me because this is, if you get this right, I think that there's a cascading effect that purifies so much of the abuses that we've seen. Because you're getting, uh, this one thing right, and you're realizing, oh my. Some of the stuff that we thought Bethel did the best is actually the stuff that made all the problems happen. So here we go. In the charismatic movement, prophecy was combined not in the whole move, every single person, but there's a significant, huge number in, uh, the charismatic movement, prophecy was combined with prosperity preaching with such low standards for testing that it was positive. If it was positive, it was approved. That is, if you said something nice, then it was approved. It didn't matter if it was true. It didn't matter truly if it was from God or not. Uh, not that it didn't matter at all, because it mattered. But it was lower on the ladder of things that matter the most. What mattered the most was if it's positive, then it's true. That's where prophecy combined with prosperity preaching. Because prosperity preaching is exactly that quote. Only the verses that are positive, only the verses that affirm you, only the verses that speak good things to you. So you can get this. Oh, there's so many things I want to share about this. You can get this with, um, the way that these prosperity guys deal with people in government. So what they do is they go to people in government and they meet someone who's a senator or they're running for local, local governmental contest, you know, whether it's mayor of a city or something, or school board. And they prophesy over them. And the prosperity preaching, oh, God wants you to exceed, excel and do. Amazingly, it just takes the form of prophecy, see. Cause Bill, these other guys, they don't speak as openly about prosperity as guys like Copeland do. But it's in their teaching. If you listen carefully, they act like they're policing it. They're not really. Just take Bill's statements about, um, not seeking after riches and the purpose of riches being to bless others, and then combine that with Steve, uh, Kozar. I'll link this video in the description, Steve Kosar's survey of all the times that Bill talks about going to the French laundry and spending like $1,000 for a meal and how it's his favorite thing to go there and hear him talking about how God wants him to have the kind of cars that only rich people can afford with like, special seating, leather seats and stuff like that. That it's clearly not just about blessing others. There's a prosperity belief that resides there, but it doesn't usually come out of their mouths unless they're prophesying. Then it comes out all the time. So take the example that I'm building. I'm. Let's say I'm a prophecy movement guy and I'm an up and comer. And I want to get in there. I want to get attention, I want to get notoriety. I want to be the next Sean Bowles. I want to be, uh, up there in the stratosphere. So what I do is whenever I meet a political person, I always prophesy God will make them president or God will raise them to the halls of Congress. I prophesy something huge and Amazing. I do it simply on the authority of my own ideas. Bill teaches that that's okay. You can do that. You can sometimes be so in such a realm with God or in tune with the Lord in some way that you're able to declare things he's not even saying, and that God will then back you up. So it's this kind of prosperity thing that's presuming upon God, that God just wants you to be prosperous and everything. And I'm going to do it in the form of prophecy. So I do this to 10, 15 different people in government. One of them ends up in Congress. The other ones all run. They fail. They go back to their normal lives. They still like me because I said such positive things about them. But one of them makes it into the halls of government, and they look back and they remember, oh, I remember when Mike told me I was going to become, you know, get in the halls of Congress. And here I am in the halls of Congress, and now I've got my in, and now I've got my end of the government, right? Because I prophesied over everybody that they would get to that spot. I prophesy over everyone who's starting a business, that they're going to make millions and God's going to make them, uh, generals in God's army, and they're going to be empowering and sending the troops around the world. And I say that to 50 people, and one of them gets rich, and now he forever is my massive financial supporter because I prophesied prosperity. And that's how this works. It's the prophecy with prosperity. Um, but there's so much more to it than that. So let me keep reading. Uh, this resulted in an environment where a false sense of prophetic empowerment in a local church due to their higher quantity of prophecy, which was too easy to fake. I've already talked about how Bethel did this. They absolutely did do this. He huge quantities of prophecy that were just far too easy to fake. There was no testing in place. We'll talk more about this a bit. Um, no biblical testing in place. The biblical guards of two or three prophets at the most. And you are then to have the rest publicly test this word instead. It's as many prophets as we want. And you privately test it. In other words, you don't test it. That's what that means. Biblically speaking, testing is a public thing. You're testing it for the congregation. You're testing it for the people to tell someone, go home and privately accept it or reject it or Whatever. But to just keep it to yourself, that's not testing at all. That's not biblical. We remove that bound, and then we offer artificial tests instead of the biblical test. Is it consistent with Scripture? Is the person's character godly? Yep. The prophet's character has to be taken into consideration in Scripture. Um, instead of those things, we have, um, is it positive? Does it make me happy? I mean, they would never say it that way. That's just what it looks like on the ground. Right? I heard that word, and, boy, I liked it. And so I'm going to receive that M, and maybe I'll twist it or tweak it or change it, but the standards are so low for prophecy that if you get things wrong in the Bethel environment and the Bethel movement, that has impacted charismatics who weren't this way before, Vineyard churches who were not this way, they have moved towards Bethel. They've adopted Bethel's idea and concept and culture of prophecy. And what they've done is they've gotten to the point where if you go to prophesy and you get it wrong, you feel good about yourself, and you're meant to feel like, oh, you took a risk for Jesus, you did something in God's name, and that was a positive thing. Pat yourself on the back. Even though you stepped out and said something that you said, I think this is God, and it wasn't God. That's a big deal. That's actually not a good thing. 4 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:41.000 You know, Chris does an amazing job. He'll take, like, a room like this. He'll pair you off, and he'll say, all right, everybody on the right, give a word of knowledge. In other words, something you couldn't know in the natural about the person you're faced off with. At the end, we'll ask the question, you know, how many of you got it right? They raised their hands, everybody claps. Says, how many of you got it wrong? They raised their hands, everybody claps. You know, we're not talking about moral failure. We're talking about as leaders, we have to create an environment where risk is applauded. 5 00:10:41.000 --> 00:26:06.000 And I know, I know there's a lot of charismatics for, like, Mike, you're taking away the best benefit Bethel has had in my life. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. This is the Trojan horse. The Trojan horse is that you create an environment whereby authenticity is seen as, I have authentic motives, as opposed to, this is the authentic work of the spirit. And as long as your M motives are authentic, that's good enough. And this is even what Chris Valatin later said is how he tested a wolf or a false prophet, or, as Chris says, a woof. How many of you guys say woof? My Aunt Sherry says, woof. Um, so anyways, he goes, this is how you know it's a woof. Right? The, uh, wolf is not the person who comes out and says, uh, here's a prophecy. It's not from God. And, uh, I'm leading people astray, and I'm guiding them away from the Lord, and I'm taking advantage of the people of God. I'm manipulating them with words that aren't from God. That's not a wolf. A wolf is someone who's doing it maliciously. Right? Because intent is more important than actual authentic work of the spirit inside the movement. And to me, I hope that this comes together. It comes together and I go, oh, it's prosperity preaching through the form of prophecy. It's exactly what it is. So you've got this high rate of fake prophecy, this combination of prosperity preaching along with it. And this caused certain churches to stand out. I write on and I read on. Certain churches stand out because you look at them and you go, hey, you've got 50 times the amount of prophecy we have in our church. Wow. And look at the reports coming out. Look at the videos coming out. And a lot of it's fake, but still, it looks amazing. And so other churches don't realize it's fake. They trust you. You seem like you're a really solid guy. You're not like Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn. You're Bill Johnson. You're, like, really seemingly simple and really approachable and really trustworthy, which, unfortunately, that last one was not true. And it causes churches to look at them and say, what an amazing move of the spirit. I wish we had that where we are. I wish we had what they have. You cannot overstate the impact this had around the world. Certain churches became the place to be. Bethel was one of those churches. Morningstar was at one time. They're still trying to be that. Not Chris Reed, the fake prophet. False, false evil guy. Uh, Chris Reed, pastor, uh, who I've already exposed in another video. I'll link it below. Chris, uh, Reed is trying to do that with his church. He's constantly trying to make his church the place to be and is faking, uh, things to get there. And so then you get the idea, like, I'm going to be there, and if I want to experience what they're experiencing, I got to go where they are. And I got to get trained by them. And that's when the trainings begin. So the trainings began. These special churches would offer prophetic training and experiences. So you're, a hungry church, could learn to copy the patterns and culture that caused such a power quote unquote, to be present in that local church. That caused, um. Oh, yeah. But you would quickly learn that this training required you to lose almost all regulations on prophecy, at least the ones that scripture commanded. Yet they do lose them. They just. And people are like, oh, Mike, what do you want me to do? I've been asked this a number of times, Mike, what are you suggesting we do? What are we supposed to do if we're not going to follow Bethel's model for prophecy? And I've actually tried it. And I'm not trying to solve every problem in the world, but I've tried to at least point people to Scripture. I have answered this question a number of times already. I'll just mention it here as well, my encouragement as your brother in Christ, as someone who stands underneath the word of God and not above it, and not someone who's got like a newfangled plan for how to conduct ministry. I simply say, go to the Word, write down all of the things the Bible says about how prophecies to be conducted, and follow those rules. It's that simple. You just follow the rules. It just takes courage to do it because it's very countercultural in that movement. But you follow the rules. We'll talk about some more of them as we go. Except there's one requirement that they don't get rid of, which is that prophecy is to be presented as a positive, encouraging message. Now, this is where, because they couched it in, you're speaking, comfort and encouragement and all this stuff. I didn't realize how much the message requirement for what prophecy could contain, it wasn't. The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. Uh, it wasn't like Ephesians. We'll read in a minute. Ephesians, glorious prophecy. It was positive prophecy, encouraging message prophecy. It was. And I would say this is prosperity preaching reigning inside of the prophetic culture. That requirement that your prophecies to be positive. It's not biblical. No matter what you say about 1 Corinthians, he who speaks, speaks encouragement and comfort. It doesn't say only those things Agabus prophesied. Jesus prophesied. He prophesied destruction of Chorazin and Bethsaida. Woe to you. We get all sorts of things like that in the New Testament and even after the resurrection of Jesus. The book of Revelation contains a lot of prophecy and a lot of it is pretty doom and gloom. It just is. Because sometimes when God speaks, he's just speaking. I'm gonna get you. You better repent. And that's all he's saying. There are times where there's rebuke that should come through prophecy and correction that should come through prophecy. 2 Timothy 3, 16. Look at this passage that you guys. Most of you know very well, right? But, uh, all scriptures, God breathes, it's given by God, and it's profitable for reproof and correction and instruction in righteousness. These terms, we think of them as related to the scripture, the word of God, the written word, but it also relates to, basically, God may want to bring you rebuke, he may want to bring you correction, he may want to bring you instruction in righteousness, or what Ephesians will do in a minute, we'll get there. So that is prosperity preaching is your prophecy in your church, which I think you should pray for and I think you should ask God for in your church. I think according to scripture, you should is your prophecy, prosperity preaching under the guise of prophetic movement such that now people can make up whatever they want as long as it's positive that we all nod along and we don't look too deeply at it and we don't really test it and we don't follow what scripture says. So instead of seriously publicly testing words, you were to welcome all words, even if they were false, they were at least encouraging. Did you give a false word? Well, if it was positive, you should pat yourself on the back. And that's an important part of the culture that I think is still present very strongly and needs to be dealt with because it's seen as a positive. And I go, no, you got to have thicker skin than that. If you did a false word, you should assess what you got wrong and why were you doing what Jeremiah's false prophets were doing? Were you prophesying of your own desires? There's a good chance you were prophecies of your own heart, things that you wish were true that you were putting in God's name. That's a very, very dangerous way to live. As, uh, I said, Jeremiah's false prophets did those things. And so you should have a sober assessment because there is a weightiness to speaking forth what God is saying. I do believe in real prophecy. That's why I want to caution against following the shiny, happy pathway to a watered down compromised man. Centered and too easy to fake prophecy. After a while, there is so much fakery that the real thing seems intrusive and limiting to the movement. And this is something I've seen. There is hardly a prophetic bone going on over inside of the top tier of the prophetic movements. They're utterly unaware they're being drug kicking and screaming by cessationists. I'm not a cessationist by the way, but there's cessationists who are speaking more prophetically into the movement than the leaders of the movement. The real thing becomes intrusive and limiting in the movement because you have wedded yourself to this prosperity preaching prophecy. You need it to move forward because it's all part of a system that is building on itself and feeding into itself. I'm not opposed to trying to encourage people in prophecy or instructing people on how to do it in a Christ honoring ways. Paul does both of those things. In 1 Corinthians he talks about how to. He tells them to seek prophecy, covet it, pray for it, seek, uh, to do it. And he also limits them on how they'll do it and tells them how to test it and how it should be done properly in order. Those things are good. Nor should we assume any church which looks like it's the center of a move of God is actually fake. No, please don't take that as my meaning. No, God may just be moving greatly in a local church and that's awesome. What I am saying is we need truth or our prophecy and our preaching is so much leaven to be clear, it's the combination of prosperity with prophetic fakery that I'm highlighting here. I, uh, should make a video on it, which I did. And right now it was this passage of scripture that got me thinking about this today. So I've been. I'm coming back from my sabbatical. This is the first video I've made on my way back. I'm not really talking about it in this video, but um, got a lot done, a lot of stuff behind the scenes done and also been at the gym a lot. So at the gym I like to come, uh, up with these long Twitter posts as I'm thinking about scripture and thinking about different things. So this is one of those. Let me read to you this. This is from Ephesians chapter 1, verse 16 through 13. I want you to read this as a model for what good, solid, amazing prophetic movement really looks and sounds like in Ephesians 1. I'll bet you've Never read it this way. I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him having the eyes of your hearts enlightened and that you may know. Okay, isn't that like, this is similar to prophecy. He's talking about not just spoken word prophecy, but the effect of prophecy when God is enlightening you to truths. And look at how glorious. There's so much better than, oh, you're going to move here and you're going to do great things and God's going to prosper you and you're entering into a season of his blessings and the time of the drought has ended and the floodwaters are coming and all of this stuff. Instead, look at this. That you may know what is the hope to which he has called you. Imagine a Christian who knows the hope to which they've been called. So many Christians go around not knowing the hope to which you've been called. You're down, you're depressed, you're upset, you're disgruntled by little things that don't matter. I certainly have been all of those things myself. And if you just know the hope to which he has called you, you will have the beatific vision. You will see God as He is. You will know him as you are known. You will be in his presence for all eternity. Uh, Paul says far better to depart and to be with Christ. He longs for this. Everything else is worthless by comparison. May you know what is the hope to which he has called you. What are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints? This is not about financial wealth in this life. That is a petty thing compared to the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints. Oh, man. Guys, we do not labor and store up for treasures on this earth, but for treasure where moth and rust cannot destroy and thieves cannot break in and steal. For an eternal, uh, unfading treasure that is stored up for us. We are living for the world to come. We're living in the world we're in now for the world to come. It's not prosperity preaching or prosperity movement. And what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe? I love this because it's one thing to know you're forgiven and it's something else to start to wrap your head around your heart around by God's empowerment, the immeasurable greatness of, of his power toward us who believe the Greatness of it. Immeasurable greatness of it. I don't have the words. May God open your eyes to see the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe. And some are like, oh, so you're talking about resurrections, healings. Um, um. It's so much more than the temporal benefits that you might be able to get in this life. According to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when He raised him from the dead and, and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to come. This is where, you know, Revelation says the testimony, the, uh, spirit of prophecy is the testimony of Jesus. That is, that is the heart behind prophecy. It is exalting Christ, not just encouraging you like a blanket, like you constantly need this warm blanket of, don't worry, God still loves you. God still cares for you. I'm not saying you never need that. I've needed that. But the more grounded you are in the theology of who God is, you don't need that. You don't need people to tell you God loves you. I don't need someone to come along and tell me that God has grace towards me. If I need it, it's because I'm blinded to something I've already received instead. Prophecy that tells you about the working of God's great might, that he worked in Christ when He raised him from the dead and seated him. Jesus exalting Jesus, not me, him in the heavenly places far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to come. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. And he put all things under his feet and gave him his head over all things to the Church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all, it's all about Jesus. Even the mention of the Church is to refocus on Christ that it were his body. Prophecy delights our hearts for Christians, because, yes, sometimes it rebukes and may even warn. But one of the major agendas of it is to draw us to an awareness of God's amazing glory, not our own, of God's amazing wonder, not our own, of Christ's goodness and immeasurable greatness. Uh, that is what it's all about. Seeing this passage as a description of what prophecy does really blows away most of the prophetic stuff I've seen publicly Coming out of big name charismatic ministries that put stuff online, the same ones I've exposed for abuses. That is the thing. Their prophecy is weak. It's weak. Not all of it. Not every single individual. I'm one of those who would say there's good people in there. Um, the movement. The movement is deeply, deeply compromised. And it's important that we understand that. In this case, the combining of prosperity preaching with prophecy explains why Bill Johnson endorses Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn and whoever else still to this day. And this is amazing. Let me just take, uh, Benny Hinn, because I've done video on him. Benny Hinn has been demonstrated to be a liar, a manipulator, to be a fake and false prophet, to offer prophecies that are not true, and to literally target old poor women in his ministry, stripping them of their last finances, doing the opposite of what scripture does, which is, let's take a collection for the poor. No, Benny Hinn takes collections from the poor. And he tells them, even that last little bit of money you've got, give it to the Lord, which means his ministry, Give it to the Lord and God will open up the windows of heaven for you. Liar. Scoundrel. Evil. Evil. Benny Hinn. If you cannot say this man's evil, it's because something evil is in your mind and in your heart. And I've got all the evidence. I'll share my four hour video. I'll link it down below the victims of Benny Hinn. And I don't even get into everything in that video, but it's more than enough. But Bill Johnson goes on stage and endorses him. So I realize now why he does. Because he's a prosperity preacher. He just does it through prophecy. 6 00:26:06.000 --> 00:26:07.000 Usually. 7 00:26:07.000 --> 00:27:53.000 Usually. Sometimes he'll do it more openly. Um, and the limits and the boundaries they put in place that make them seem more respectable than Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland. It's just a tactic. The doctrine is not really any different. And they'll say, oh, we're not asking for greed. But then they're super greedy. God wants me to have the super expensive cars with super expensive seating. I remember him talking about that. The French Laundry. I would be embarrassed to eat there. I'd be embarrassed to eat there. That's exactly what flaunting of wealth is meaning in scripture. When you're being, um, worldly. Worldly with your money. Um, and no, but I'm a king's kid. And there was nothing too good for the child of the king. And all this prosperity preaching mixed with prophecy, prosperity movement identified. And my encouragement is Christians of conviction inside Bethel. Christians of conviction who are inside these different movements and impacted. Maybe you're a Vineyard church. You started going Bethel's direction, and now you need to pull back away. Eradicate. Eradicate this by going back to the drawing board and saying the very culture of prophecy that they have created is wrong. And it's not just that they have hard and fast rules, it's the culture around it. It's the culture around it, calling out the gold, all those kinds of things. Not biblical, not helpful. And now I think I understand. It's just prosperity preaching. What do you want? What do you want? 8 00:27:53.000 --> 00:28:00.000 Yeah.